Читать книгу Force Decisions. A Citizen's Guide to Understanding How Police Determine Appropriate Use of Force онлайн

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For a citizen, it wouldn’t have been necessary. Citizens aren’t required or expected to rush toward danger. Citizens are not responsible for the safety of the people around them and citizens, usually, can’t be censured or disciplined if they fail to stop someone else’s bad acts.

If a man with a knife runs toward an occupied house, the citizen has no responsibility to the people inside. An officer does and may need to make a choice to shoot a man in the back and live with the consequences of that choice…or to not shoot him and live with the possibility that the threat might kill children in the house.

There are no perfect answers in most tense situations. There are few, if any solutions where all parties involved are going to walk away with a smile in their hearts. Sometimes there aren’t even good answers. Sometimes there will be orphans. The officer’s duty in those situations is to try to choose the least bad answer.

To call a decision ‘bad’ we must have an alternate answer that we are sure would have resulted in less tragedy.